Hi, all --
I'm going to be posting this on the 12.x thread as well. Mods, delete if thought appropriate; maybe there should be a separate "quantitative analysis of FSD" thread.
As a reminder, I'm interested in FSD 12 because I'm short Tesla because I think the stock overvalued. I'm more than willing to discuss to my position, but it isn't relevant to this current conversation, I'm only bringing this up because I don't want to be accused of false-flagging down the line. I think it is possible for people to disagree about stock valuations while remaining civil, and in fact even friendly. This isn't a "change my mind!" thing, it's more a, "Let me try to understand how other people are thinking about this" thing. I'm not looking for a hammer-and-tongs debate, just a conversation.
I'm going to try to be quantitative, but (of necessity) very sloppily so, I'm going to be using big round numbers, powers of 2 and 10.
I'm hoping to explore likelihood/timelines for an FSD robotaxi/personal chauffeur scenario. To keep the discussion manageable, let's limit the discussion to "FSD robotaxi in San Francisco." as the endpoint.
I'm basing this discussion on the fsdtracker,
FSD Community Tracker
www.teslafsdtracker.com
where I take "Miles To City Critical Disengagement" to be the key metric.
That was a very long preamble! Sorry, let's dig in.
1: Is there any reason to not use fsdtracker #s for this conversation? My sense is that all systemic biases (not a criticism, Elias!) point in the direction of the tracker overestimating FSD's reliability, but people's experiences are so wildly variable that that luck of the draw could easily be dragging them down. Based on my social media monitoring, (which include a ton of TMC!) I find them plausible. Does anyone disagree? This isn't, "They don't match my experience, it always works for me," or,, "They don't match my experience, it never worked for me"; this is, "Do you find the *aggregate* tracker #s implausible"?
2: My read on the tracker #s is: 10.x and 111.x were about 80-90 mile/CCDE. (That's "City Critical Disengagement."). I've never actually done the calculation, that's an eyeball #. I just checked, and 12.x is at 180 miles, so about twice as good, but, as I think most participants in this TMC subsection would agree, nowhere close to "ride hail in San Francisco" levels.
3: What would be good enough? California requires you to share data and jump through hoops to run robotaxis. I'm going with 10Kmi/CCDE as the level at which it makes sense to start sharing and hoop-jumping, and 100kmi/CCDE as the point at which I'd start wanting to roll out a robotaxi service. Note these are very round numbers, they're powers of 10! So I get 2 orders of magnitude to start getting serious, and 3 to start rolling out.
4: How long might that take? I have no idea, and that's where I'm really hoping for some thoughts from the group. If reliability doubles every year, you're looking at 6-7 years before it's time to start getting serious about validation; if it quadruples, you can cut that down to 4. Assuming two years for hoop-jumping and validation, you get 6-9 years before you've got SF robotaxis. I know some people have much more aggressive timelines, but don't understand why. "Data!" doesn't cut it; 12.x presumably already embodies a good chunk of the data Tesla has accumulated to date, and that corpus is not going to double annually, so even 2x/year assumes some source of "non-data" improvement.
The above analysis is obviously from a really million miles away, very abstract POV. I'm fine with that, and would actually prefer to keep it that way, because we're very much in powers of 2 and 10 territory.
A final note about growth rates -- I've had my ups and downs as an investor, but at one point did 8x in 6 years, which consisted of a double in 4 years (not bad!) and a quadruple in 2. When some number quadruples in 2 years, you can really feel it. I actually think I could have done better than 4x, but the growth threw my sizing off. As someone (Alan?) pointed out, the trajectory of 12.x/E2E is likely to be settled very soon.
Sorry for the super long post. To sum up: Any reason to not use tracker numbers as the starting point? Any reason to think MBTF will see a greater than 4x annual increase?
Yours,
RP
